A Vignette of my life with Robert Adams and discovering Nothingness

 A Vignette of my life with Robert Adams and discovering Nothingness

                                       Edward Muzika

 

I was with my teacher Robert Adams for eight years, from 1989 to 1997. I attended Satang twice a week, I also drove Robert to Satang and back on Thursdays. Every Wednesday we had lunch at Follow Your Heart in Chatsworth after spending time walking and talking in Robert’s park, called Warner Park in Woodland Hills. Each time I was with him was a special occasion for me.

 

Robert was a very unusual man. A very quiet and unassuming man. He never talked much but he did listen more deeply than almost anyone else I knew. I know many spiritual teachers now and over the years many Zen masters. Most of these teachers you probably would not recognize as spiritual teachers if you met them on the street. Most of them were quite talkative, and most had many many opinions about politics, life, society, relationships. Most of them, in Satang or in their writings, appeared much more spiritual and elevated than they were in real life. In Satang it was like they put on a cloak of being the master, the teacher, or a mouthpiece for the divine. Many talked about spiritual powers or things that happened around them that were unusual as if to add verification of their claim of being an elevated spiritual teacher. This is not to say they were not interesting people to hang around with. But they had grown quite used to being "the spiritual teacher” in whatever setting.  Robert NEVER spoke about such “worldly”  He told me that if he had not come down with severe Parkinson’s, he would still be living alone in a cabin in Oregon.

 

There is a video on YouTube that I think is called "The Three Gurus." Here three of my friends, Swami Shankarananda, Swami Chetanananda, and Brother Charles discussed their personal difficulties in living their role of spiritual teacher with followings of hundreds of students. Mostly they talked about being in a situation where they were considered to be above everybody else in terms of spiritual understanding and attainment and try to work into that role without hurting people without being hurt by them. As Swami Chetanananda stated, as soon as you are given the title of "guru", you walk around with a target on your back. And all the shit inthe world was directed at you. I really appreciated this short film because they came across as real human beings who had mastered certain aspects of life, but were put in the situation where they where they were subject to attack on almost a constant basis, including by the general public which held suspicion towards all gurus.

 

But Robert was very different. He was absolutely quiet. He rarely talked or spoke unless to respond to something you said. He was quite content to be nobody. In our periodic celebrations where we had Satang with dinner or with entertainment, people would mill around talking to each other, and be very animated. But often Robert would be off alone by himself, either in his speaker's chair, or somewhere else in the room quietly eating without a lot of people talking to him. He just let everybody alone. He waited for people to come to him, engage with him, and then respond in a way he thought most appropriate. I knew from the things he said to me that he always considered where the student was coming from and told them what they needed to hear in order to help them in everyday life and spiritually.

 

I remember one time we were at lunch in the patio of Follow Your Heart, and he was especially quiet and silent. So I asked him, "Robert, you're so silent today, is there a reason?" And he responded, "I am trying to think of a way to to cook you." This was the lunch about a month or two before we were all to leave for Sedona to start a new sangha there and ending our sangha in Los Angeles. Somehow I felt honored that he was thinking about me, and how to get me to a place I thought of as enlightenment or self-realization. And boy, despite25 years of Zen practice as well as studying other teachers, I really had no idea what enlightenment was.

 

I really can't emphasize enough how quiet and ordinary Robert was. The only way he was special, was that he never directed any attention to himself and mostly stayed in the background. He did not publicly make waves of any sort, but in the background he was always stirring the pot of Satang in order to cook people, to get them to face sticking points in themselves, so that they become freer of entanglements and be able to see themselves in a deeper way, in a non-world-obsessed way.

 

Those who have listened to his Satangs or were there in person, often would hear him start Satang by saying, "You don't exist!, or, "The World Is Not Real."  Almost invariably this caused loud chuckling from the audience as they heard these ridiculous words, saying that we did not exist, and our bodies were optical illusions. The world did not exist. He often used the words "emptiness" or "Nothingness" as descriptive of our true nature. Some of his students would copy him, saying I'm nobody or nothing, but really they copied him because the word made them feel good when they said it. But I was never satisfied with that. I wondered what did Robert mean by Nothing, emptiness, or the Void? Was it the same as my own long experience of emptiness and Void in Zen?

I did not move with Robert to Sedona even though I had planned on doing so and even was instrumental in getting Robert to decide to move to Sedona. Nothing worked out for me. It's a long story I'll tell it some other time. I was left behind in Santa Monica, where I felt abandoned because much of the sangha moved to Sedona. I spent the next several weeks doing nothing except lying on a couch listening to various chanting tapes, mostly Muktanananda tapes with a cassette player and earphones. I even went out walking listening to chanting. I felt depressed, but I loved the chanting, the chanting elevated me and at the same time allowed the loneliness to be O.K.

 

Then one day, I had an amazing experience. I felt that I was awake and yet I was aware of nothing, but I saw what appeared to be consciousness coming towards me across a distance, like a fog bank coming to me on the shore from the sark ocean behind. It got closer and closer, and when it hit me, suddenly the world appeared and I was awake. Before that no thoughts came, there was just this experience of observing consciousness coming to me. For some reason I knew that fog was consciousness, I didn't realize then, and if I were to be asked who or where I was, I would have had to say I don't know, because as far as I was concerned, there was nothing I could identify as me, or a place I was. Consciousness came to me. I was not consciousness, but it came to me where I was and whatever I was. You might say that I was no-thing-ness located in nothingness.

 

A few hours later I called Robert and Sedona nd told him I missed him and the sangha, and I felt that I had been left behind. He responded, "Ed, you left yourself behind." I told him about my experience, and very suddenly, quietly and strangely Robert said to me, "Congratulations! You are enlightened!" But when Robert said it, he said it so matter-of-factly, that it didn't seem extraordinary at all. So he said I was enlightened, and that was that.

 

I felt a bit mystified because my preconceptions were that the enlightenment experience would be far more explosive and disruptive than the quiet experience it had been. I could never have guessed that enlightenment was a realization that was so quiet, so silent, and so peacefully nonexplosive.

 

(I would have a far more explosive experience 16 years later, which I called my God-realization experience, but that is a different story altogether. But it does appear to me that there are different tracks in spiritual development, a Shakti track as taught by Swami Muktananda, in the far more peaceful and outwardly disappearance from the world as the Advaita track of Robert and Ramana. Robert never mentioned anything about the Shakti awakenings, but I’m quite certain they happened to him many years before I met him, and he was teaching the track he felt best suited American students of this age.)

 

I visited Robert a few times in Sedona before his death during February 1997 and enjoyed the visits thoroughly. He always put me at the head of the table with him, and kept asking me to move to Sedona, but I knew I didn't belong there. Many times before, I was supposed to accompany Robert to Sedona, or go to see Robert in Sedona, but got desperately ill, just like the first time I drove him, and had to stay in Phoenix instead. The Sedona job I had been promised just disappeared, and Kerima didn’t want to leave Santa Monica.

 

What a startling understanding he gave me! What I am fundamentally is beyond the senses and in fact witnesses the senses, and witnesses the world through my nonexistent body which it senses. Yet I--as the transcendent--lay totally outside of consciousness, and as such not subject to birth or death. From this ultimate viewpoint of being the witness of consciousness, I was separate from consciousness and from anything that happened in consciousness, even though when awake in the conscious I appeared to be a human being living in three-dimensional world. This experience sort of severed the attachment that I felt towards consciousness in the world I experienced in consciousness around me.

 

Now this is heavy.

 

I was not saying I was nothing because I had heard Robert say it over and over again, and I liked the sound of it, or how it made me feel, but in fact it was the truth. The primary me, the source, was the witness of consciousness totally separate from it and not within the existence of consciousness itself. Thus I was free from life and death, from birth and death, and from any emotions in the world. They became little things that I observed and not intrinsic to my silence within, with my total relaxation, my total surrender of anything that had been human in me to the infinite. Thus I can finally say, I know what Robert meant when he said I didn't exist and that he was nothing. As Robert would repeat over and over again on his deathbed, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

 

 

                                     Robert and I circa 1994

 All of Robert’s Satsang audio tapes and transcripts are available on the Web at: robert-adams.info. Also, we have Satsang online, at 11AM on Wednesdays and Sundays, Arizona time. You may need to tell your computer to open the following link. The link is:   https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fus02web.zoo

us%2Fj%2F87385817496%3Fpwd%3DN1Y1bWo1OW1CUjdFZ3B3bXlHTG

dz09%26fbclid%3DIwAR3QNH3yUZykSBagrU3jM4MIhzpAXEXraf-

Xf7YAT0vkzNM6a7vG45dwKxs&h=AT2wF7-3a7ePGeAedvcVDmqZ2xxZZcz

MVVoSxTtjw5D3vRbZUdkKPBP5jWfzUegQh8RsRFeyqrUdbtw5oRhSQJYvo

vzjNLsDTgTZ3zQs8JjGyzF-PaV9DvQM14sbfMfyYpk8LFs4Zg

 

NOTE: You can verify my understanding of consciousness by witnessing it for yourself through daily practice. Try this for a month or so.

 

When you first wake up in the morning do a scan of your body, it’s feelings, your thoughts, and where those thoughts appear to arise and disappear. Do this first thing every morning until it becomes a habit. This is the most difficult part of the training. Train yourself to become aware of your “first light” experiences. Those experiences that are first in consciousness, but also try to remain aware that you really are interested in finding the origin of consciousness. With a little practice, you will eventually remember to be aware of consciousness even before it comes to you, before you wake up. You already do that if you have an alarm clock because you often awaken just before the alarm goes off because you felt time pass and know when the alarm will ring. Then you will become aware that consciousness is arising within YOU, and when it arrives, the world appears. But you were there first, and are welcoming consciousness coming to you who was aware of it, and with its arrival, the world is born. Then you will understand and feel like you are separate from consciousness because it is a state that comes to you who are already aware and didn’t need consciousness to be aware. You are aware of both consciousness and your body being separate from you, but where you are as awareness cannot be experienced or understood, because you as awareness are totally beyond both. You are beyond consciousness and the world and are not of either. Congratulations, you will be enlightened, and spend the next couple of decades unfolding that enlightenment, but you may not feel like it because you trained for it rather than having it happen to you suddenly in a spontaneous way. But the truth will grow on you.